Red flags fluttered and streamers, posters and banners hung all over Calcutta today on the eve of the party's seven-day conclave beginning tomorrow. At Calcutta airport and at the two city railway terminals at Sealdah and Howrah, proud comrades sat day and night to welcome delegates from all over India as well as from fraternal communist and socialistparties from 18 countries.

The delegates from outside have been housed at the State Government-run Great Eastern Hotel, the guest house of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture and some other places. Several hundred party volunteers from the districts of West Bengal are cooling their heels at the Salt Lake Stadium complex.

In 1964, it was a very different story. The delegates at Thyagaraja Hall were a harried lot. Many of them had just been released from jails where they had been lodged at the outbreak of the 1962 India-China war. Many were still underground. On the eve of the congress at Thyagaraja Hall, many party leaders, including the secretary of the West Bengal unit Promode Dasgupta, were arrested by Prafulla Chandra Sen's Congress government. Within the party too 1964 was a watershed. It was the year of the split but for several years before that fierce factional rivalry had raged, particularly over the Moscow-versus-Beijing debate, leading to the suspension of 32 national council members ofthe CPI. They included Harkishen Singh Surjeet, Jyoti Basu, E M S Namboodiripad, P Sundaraiya, M Basavapunniah and Promode Dasgupta. They suspended leaders met Tenali in Andhra Pradesh to prepare for the birth of the new party, CPI(M).

The party's tormentor in 1964 was the Congress. At EMS Nagar from tomorrow, the party, now ruling West Bengal for over 21 years, will debate how close it can align with the Congress in its fight against the BJP. In that respect, it will be an about turn from Thyagaraja Hall to EMS Nagar. So much so that an old CPM watcher quipped, ``This party congress is actually going to be the party toward Congress.''

Since the Chandigarh congress three years ago, the party is more or less united on the line of treating the BJP as enemy number one. In a long article today in the party's Bengali organ, Ganashakti, general secretary Surjeet spewed venom on the BJP-RSS ``conspiracy to divide the country on communal lines''. Surjeet and influential central committee member Biman Bose, whowrote another article in Ganashakti today, spoke of the failures of the so-called third front but still harped on the need for such a front.

But none of them even mentioned the issue of aligning with the Congress. The reason is simple : with the third front in tatters,the Congress issue has become the most controversial one before the party congress. With leaders like Basu and Surjeet openly supporting the line of aligning with the Congress and another section opposing it, if not so openly, it truly is going to be the party congress where befriending the Congress will cause ripples.